Prince Harry was dying to tell his story to the world, and he did in his memoir Spare. Doing so he threw all caution to the wind and made shocking revelations that hurt the British monarchy, the royal family, and above all, his relationship with his father and brother.
Now we learn that by publicly admitting to his copious use of drugs he may have endangered his U.S. visa as well.
The Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation wants U.S. authorities to publish the Duke of Sussex’s visa application to determine whether he was asked to disclose any drug use. In Spare, Harry describes taking drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, mushrooms and ayahuasca. This could be grounds for the revocation of his visa and even for deportation.
Mike Howell, director of the foundation’s Oversight Project, told the Daily Mail: “This request is in the public interest in light of the potential revocation of Prince Harry’s visa for illicit substance use and further questions regarding the Prince’s drug use and whether he was properly vetted before entering the United States.”
In 2020, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle left Britain for a new life in America to escape a wave of hostile media coverage, which they said the royal family was not helping them deal with. Much of their ill feeling was directed at the British press, particularly the tabloids, which the couple said were uniquely intrusive and hostile, but their aggressive approach to the problem only served to exacerbate it.
At first their experience in America seemed to be more positive. Then gradually, after making endless complaints and accusations against those that Harry and Meghan felt were treating them badly, that relationship soured and the sympathy they initially enjoyed from the American public waned. There was a constant wave of vindictive rhetoric that ironically lost them the sympathy they were craving and courting. The grab for cash and the wheeling and dealing–profiting off the very titles that they claimed they wanted to leave behind–became too naked, and the incongruity became too obvious even for many who were initially sympathetic.
After the publication of Spare there has been a significant swing against the couple in U.S. polling. They are now significantly less popular in America than they were even in Britain at the time they chose to leave.
In January, Meghan was liked by 26 percent of Americans and disliked by 39 percent, giving her a net approval rating of -13, in polling done by Redfield & Wilton for Newsweek. Harry was liked by 31 percent and disliked by 38 percent of Americans in January, giving him a net approval rating of -7. This compares with the 72 percent of Brits who liked him and 21 percent who disliked him in November 2019, adding up to a net approval rating of +51. A tremendous fall from grace by any count.
In addition, they have become the butt of jokes on late night television and in the media.
If the Heritage Foundation is successful in its campaign and the result is “the potential revocation of Prince Harry’s visa,” that would be a major milestone for the prince’s critics on either side of the Atlantic. Nothing that has happened thus far would have consequences comparable to the prospect of Harry being deported from the U.S.
In Spare’s account of his drug use, Harry wrote: “Psychedelics did me some good as well. I’d experimented with them over the years, for fun, but now I’d begun to use them therapeutically, medicinally. They didn’t simply allow me to escape reality for a while, they let me redefine reality.”
“Under the influence of these substances I was able to let go of rigid preconcepts, to see that there was another world beyond my heavily filtered senses, a world that was equally real and doubly beautiful—a world with no red mist, no reason for red mist. There was only truth.”
Casting his drug use as therapeutic may not be enough to save his visa, since his reputation as a hell-raising and reckless party-goer who exercised poor judgement was public knowledge all along.
